Typical electrical connectors include housings normally of insulating material and having a plurality of cavities or passages into which male or female terminals are inserted. In a hard wired connector, each terminal normally is precrimped to a wire conductor and then inserted into a housing cavity where it is retained in place by a locking structure. Typically the locking structure may include resilient tangs or latch projections which engage shoulders on the housing within the cavity. Mating plug and socket housings then can be joined in order to interconnect mating male and female terminals mounted in the housings, or the housings might be joined with other terminal supporting devices.
Although connectors of the character described above have been successfully used for many years, unreliable interconnections between the terminals can occur in some instances. For example, a terminal may not be fully inserted into its housing cavity during assembly whereby the locking structure is not effective to secure the terminal in place. When the terminal is joined with a mating terminal, the incompletely mounted terminal can be pushed out of position so that the interconnection between terminals is not made. In addition, even if a connection is made initially, a terminal can subsequently work loose because of vibrations or other extraneous forces and cause a faulty or intermittent connection. Consequently, a variety of systems have been designed wherein a separate terminal locking member is employed on the connector housing to act as either a primary or a secondary locking means. These locking members are inserted longitudinally or laterally into the connector housing. Those locking members inserted longitudinally, although working satisfactorily for certain applications, require two separate parts to be molded, inventoried and shipped which adds to the cost and labor of the connector.
In order to avoid the expensive separate locking members, systems have been designed wherein the locking members have been molded integrally with the housing and inserted laterally into the terminal cavities. These laterally inserted locking members have projections which directly contact an edge or shoulder of a terminal. Because the edge of the terminal and the contact portion of the projection must be located with accuracy, very close tolerances on the dimensions of these parts must be maintained during manufacture. This increases the cost of manufacturing. There is a need for a system which employs laterally inserted locking members which is simple and efficient to manufacture and use and avoiding the requirement for maintaining close tolerances during manufacture, thereby reducing manufacturing costs. The present invention is directed to satisfying that need and solving the variety of problems outlined above.